In the past, shoppers had to take separate trips to the butcher, baker, and market to find and gather the ingredients they would need to prepare a meal.

Then, supermarkets were born, and this fragmented shopping system was turned into a “one-stop shop” where consumers could get anything they needed for dinner in one place.

Now, technology has taken this concept a step further, with mega e-commerce vendors acting as online marketplaces where you can get everything from groceries to furniture, even cars and industrial machinery, with just a few clicks of a button.

While these sites allow a consumer to go to one place to research, compare and ultimately purchase almost anything, mortgage lenders need more than just a mega-vendor that can sell them individual point products. They need a provider who can package individual products into intelligent and integrated solutions or bundles that plug into existing workflows to help make their processes faster, less expensive, and more user-friendly.

Let’s take this analogy a step further, and think about what happens when your package, say a piece of furniture, arrives from a store. Unless you’ve paid for assembly, you’ll open the box to find pieces of wood, some different sized screws, a small Allen wrench, and a numbered instruction booklet; all of which should make the process pretty straightforward.

However, like evaluating and verifying a borrower’s loan file, the process of building a piece of furniture is laborious, time-consuming, and subject to human error. That’s why items that arrive “pre-assembled” are so appealing – there’s no fuss, no confusion and no waking up in the middle of the night to a large thud when your dresser drawer falls off.

Mortgage lenders need a solution that helps take the guesswork out of evaluating and verifying a borrower’s qualifications; one that helps streamline and standardize existing manual processes to yield more consistent results in a fraction of the time; an automated process that helps mortgage underwriters feel more confident when facing QC and audit reviews.

While many other industries have turned to technology to optimize manual processes, mortgage underwriting has continued to lag behind on digital transformation. But what if every origination wasn’t like putting together a piece of wobbly furniture?

We believe the mortgage origination process of the future will provide lenders with intelligent, integrated solutions from one vendor, delivered in a way that is flexible enough to use a variety of different workflows with varying data formats. It will minimize human touches and maximize process transparency for both underwriters and consumers to reduce redundant feedback loops and other workflow inefficiencies.

By increasing the reliability of the process and increasing underwriter productivity, this workflow will help reduce the time and costs required to close loans while improving the overall user experience. With millions of mortgages issued each year, we’re hoping the mortgage origination process of the future isn’t too far away.